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The Short Form
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| $9,574 (as tested) / MARTINLOGAN.COM |
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Snapshot
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| A lively sound and attention-getting industrial design make this the ideal speaker for audiophiles who want an alternative to ordinary on-walls |
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Plus
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| • Unusually clear treble • Unusually intelligible dialogue • Unusually potent small subwoofer |
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Minus
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| • A little weird-looking • A little bright-sounding at times • A lot of AC cords to connect |
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Key Features
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• Feature ($1,695 each): 1-inch tweeter, electrostatic midrange panel, two 5 1/4-inch woofers; 150-watt amplifier; 29 3/4in wide, 20 lb • Abyss ($1,099): 12-inch woofer, 300-watt amplifier; 15 7⁄8 in high, 40 lb |
Electrostatic speakers use a large polyester diaphragm in place of (or in addition to) the usual woofers and tweeters. These speakers are typically big, measuring at least 4 feet tall, with most bearing some resemblance to Japanese shoji screens. But Martin Logan — the company perhaps most associated with electrostatics — has been combating the stereotypical image of ’stats. A new industrial design team has reduced the speakers’ size and added stylish touches.
The latest reflection of its efforts is the Feature. The fact that the Feature is an on-wall electrostatic speaker makes it a rare breed. On top of that, an internal amplifier powers all of its drivers. Martin Logan says it added the amp to reduce cable clutter, but I’m not buying it. After all, each speaker requires its own AC cord in addition to an audio cable. To me, the real advantage of the Feature’s amp is that it’s tailored to the needs of the speaker drivers — and electrostatic panels can present a demanding load to an amplifier.
The Feature’s electrostatic panel measures about 15 by 6 inches, and covers frequencies from 450 Hz to 4.5 kHz. A 1-inch soft-dome tweeter handles the treble, while two 51⁄4-inch woofers pump out the bass.
Most electrostatic speakers don’t use a tweeter, but the Feature needs it because it’s intended for either horizontal or vertical positioning. At high frequencies, a curved electrostatic panel like the one in the Feature tends to disperse sound broadly across its curve, but narrowly at 90° and 270° angles to that curve. Thus, flipping the speaker 90° radically changes its dispersion characteristics. The Feature’s tweeter assures that high frequencies disperse broadly no matter if it’s mounted horizontally or vertically. Either way, this speaker’s audacious mix of arcs and angles clearly advertises that you’re serious about sound.
Because the Feature can’t reproduce deep bass, my review system included one of Martin Logan’s Abyss subwoofers. The Abyss employs a 12-inch aluminum-cone driver and a 300-watt internal amp. It sits on a stand with spiked feet, and you can place the stand so that the woofer fires either forward or down — a feature that will come in handy if you intend to place your Abyss in a cabinet or an entertainment center.
SETUP
The Feature can be wall-mounted horizontally or vertically, or placed horizontally on a stand. Martin Logan supplies a couple of rubber feet that also allow the speaker to sit flat atop a stand or shelf. A switch on the back, marked simply On-Wall and Off-Wall, compensates for the acoustic effects of on-wall mounting.
Two keyhole mounting brackets come with each Feature, and a template makes it easy to position them. MartinLogan even throws in a right-angle RCA adapter so you don’t have to worry about the RCA plug bumping into the wall behind the speaker.
The Feature offers line-level and speaker-level connections. I tried both, using a Denon AVR-2809CI A/V receiver and a Krell S-300i stereo integrated amp. I didn’t hear a big difference between the two types of connections — the former had perhaps a touch more sparkle in the treble. But even though there’s no need to have the receiver’s amplifiers in the signal chain, terminating speaker cables is easier than terminating line-level interconnects, so I suspect many installers will use a speaker-level connection.
Whether you’re a do-it-yourselfer or a custom installer, the Abyss is one friendly little sub. It fits easily into tiny spaces. Once you’ve chosen the way you want to position its stand, installing it is just like installing any typical subwoofer. It has line-level and speaker-level inputs and outputs, as well as the usual volume, phase, and crossover-frequency controls.
MOVIE & MUSIC PERFORMANCE
I normally don’t consider the music performance of on-wall speakers all that important, because they’re used primarily for TV and movie watching. But I figure anyone who would consider the Feature must be somewhat of an audiophile, so I started with plain stereo.
Stupidly expecting to hear fairly standard on-wall sound through the Features, I did a double take worthy of any character from Scooby-Doo, Where Are You? as soon as I began playing my favorite test tracks. This speaker throws a stereo soundstage like no other on-wall I can remember hearing. On my favorite soundstaging test track — Indian percussionist Trilok Gurtu’s “Once I Wished a Tree Upside Down” from the CD Living Magic — I clearly heard bells coming from far behind me. Even the very best freestanding speakers struggle to create such enveloping stereo sound. When I played my other audiophile recordings, the sound was astonishingly spacious and deep. That’s the electrostatic panel talking, I’m sure.
The Feature exudes a lively tonality, bringing out the details of acoustic stringed instruments and percussion, the breath of flute players, and the nuances of vocal performances. This character suited most of the music I listen to, although it did become grating when I played heavy-metal tunes like System of a Down’s “BYOB.”
The Abyss subwoofer simply ate up that music, though, pumping out the kick drum and bass guitar notes with precise pitch definition, low distortion, and surprisingly high output. (Translation: It rocked.) Incidentally, the Feature sounds pretty satisfying without a sub; a stereo pair would make a nice music system.
Throughout my music listening, I did notice some subtle frequency-response anomalies, but all sounded mild, and narrow in scope. I’m impressed that Martin Logan’s engineers were able to keep these irregularities largely at bay despite the speaker’s disparate drivers.
The Feature’s clarity — a quality that made it so compelling when I listened to music CDs — was also present with movie soundtracks. Dialogue sounded exceptionally clear, although bright-sounding recordings sometimes seemed a little too edgy. The Feature’s ability to extract (and highlight) all the ambient details in surround sound music such as ZZ Top’s Live from Texas Blu-ray Disc made the presentation exceptionally exciting and inspired me to turn the system up as loud as it could go. (Electrostatic panels are naturally dipolar, a characteristic that gives them a spacious sound well suited to surround channel use.)
The Abyss easily kept up with the quintet of Features. On my reference mothership flyover — the opening of Star Wars: Episode II — Attack of the Clones — it reproduced the spaceship’s deep rumbling with no audible trace of distortion. Even many much larger subs struggle with this passage. How does Martin Logan do it? Apparently by limiting the sub’s extreme low-frequency output. While it sounded exceptionally clean with all the material I tried, it still never managed to shake the floor in the same manner as beefier subs.
BOTTOM LINE
Used on its own or with the company’s Abyss subwoofer, Martin Logan’s Feature speaker brings a new excitement to on-wall audio. It’s not the kind of by-the-book performance you get from many conventional on-wall speakers, but in many ways it’s more compelling. In fact, audiophiles will probably prefer this system to any other on-wall rig — both because of its sound quality and because it’s an original and exotic take on what has become a predictable product category.
TEST BENCH
Frequency response (at 2 meters)
Feature (vert. mount) 63 Hz to 18.8 kHz ±4.0 dB
Feature (horiz. mount) 63 Hz to 18.3 kHz ±3.0 dB
Feature (stand mount) 63 Hz to 20 kHz ±4.4 dB
Abyss subwoofer 18 to 120 Hz ±3 dB
Bass limits (lowest frequency and maximum SPL with limit of 10% distortion at 2 meters in a large room)
Feature LCR: 40 Hz at 77.9 dB
Abyss Subwoofer: 35.5 Hz at 79.8 dB
105 dB average SPL from 35.5 to 80 Hz
115.7 dB maximum SPL at 63 Hz
Bandwidth uniformity 76%
All of the curves in the frequency-response graph are weighted to reflect how sound arrives at a listener's ears with normal speaker placement. Measurements were made at 2 meters to ensure that full effects of cabinet diffraction and front panel reflections were included. The Feature was measured mounted both vertically and horizontally on a large piece of plywood that mimicked the acoustical effect of a wall. It was also measured atop a 6-foot stand with its boundary switch in the Off-Wall setting. These tests gave quasi-anechoic results down to about 250 Hz. Response of woofers was close-miked, summed, and spliced to the quasi-anechoic response.
Given the Feature’s exotic combination of drivers and its unusual shape, the frequency response is surprisingly smooth. No matter how the speaker was measured, it showed slight peaks centered at 3.1 kHz and 12.3 kHz, and a mild dip at 14 kHz. It also disperses sound fairly consistently whether it is mounted vertically or horizontally — quite an achievement when you consider the disparate dispersion characteristics of the various drivers employed in this design. Interestingly, in all positions, the response was actually smoother at 15º off-axis than it was on-axis. With the speaker mounted vertically, major response anomalies didn’t occur until the measurement mike was moved at least 45º off-axis. With the speaker mounted horizontally, big dips at 3 kHz and 5 kHz show up at 30º off-axis.
(By the way, treble response in all modes extends above 20 kHz. The on-wall measurements are stated into the 18 -kHz range to provide a more relevant representation of the smoothness of the speaker’s response. Anomalies above 18 kHz are not normally audible to adult ears.)
The On-Wall switch on the back of the Feature engages a filter to help lessen the acoustical effect of wall mounting. According to my measurements, it produces a -3 dB cut centered at 620 Hz. Matching between the two Feature samples I measured was good, deviating by 1.5 dB in a couple of very narrow frequency bands but generally staying within 0.5 dB. All of these measurements were taken through the line-level input; measurements made through the speaker-level inputs were essentially identical.
The impedance of the Feature runs higher than the 999-ohm maximum range of my lab equipment, because my equipment was designed to measure passive speakers, not active speakers such as the Feature. MartinLogan rates the impedance at the speaker terminals at 2,000 ohms; my measurement confirmed an impedance of 1,950 ohms at DC. Sensitivity measured 93.5 dB at 1 meter with a 2.83-volt signal at the speaker terminals. None of these measurements is important, though — the Feature’s speaker-level input draws so little current that any audio amplifier can drive it.
Bass output of the Feature is excellent for an on-wall speaker; unless really powerful bass is demanded, it can deliver satisfyingly full sound without a subwoofer. At our bass output measurement threshold of 10% THD at 2 meters in a large room, the wall-mounted Feature averages 91 dB between 40 and 80 Hz, reaching a peak of 100.7 dB at 80 Hz. The speaker’s useful bass extension is roughly 40 Hz, where it puts out 77.9 dB.
The Abyss appears to be designed for maximum output in the middle octave of bass, from 40 to 80 Hz. It delivers a maximum output of 115.7 dB at 63 Hz, which is impressive for such a small subwoofer. Maximum bass extension is 35.5 Hz, at which frequency output is 79.8 dB at 10% THD. Average SPL from 35.5 to 80 Hz is 105 dB. The close-miked response of the Abyss extends below 20 Hz, but the sub produces more than 10% THD at all signal levels at 30 Hz and below, so it’s not effective in the bottom 2/3rd-octave of bass.